The city belongs to all of us, including to the poor and to the refugees. The city council needs to focus on making the biggest medley so not only people or organizations with money, but everyone has a chance to settle at their place of choice. The heart of a city is essential part of making a city livable and therefore cheap rents for housing and shops should be preserved.

The Secretariat has the honour to transmit to the Human Rights Council the report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and on the right to non-discrimination in this context, Leilani Farha, on her mission to Chile from 20 to 28 April 2017 pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 34/9.

Can $500 empower a group of citizens to transform their neighbourhood? In the words of Véronique Fournier, Executive Director of the Montreal Urban Ecology Centre (MUEC), this modest sum was a “spark.”

The Just City Essays: 26 Visions for Urban Equity, Inclusivity and Opportunity is an international response to the persistence of injustice in the world’s cities. As troubling headlines from Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore, Johannesburg and myriad other cities have made clear over the past 16 months, dramatic inequalities in income, housing and safety demand a continued search for ideas and solutions. This free ebook brings together the voices of architects, artists, community activists, ecologists, mayors, philanthropists and social scientists from 22 cities and myriad vantages to offer 26 visions for change. The Just City Essays: 26 Visions for Urban Equity, Inclusivity and Opportunity is a collaboration between The J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at The City College of New York, Next City and The Nature of Cities, published with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Municipal Art Society of New York. Download today and join the conversation.

In the first of a special series on the impact of gentrification on cities around the world, Dan Hancox meets victims and beneficiaries of this highly emotive issue – and finds that the anger is real, and resistance is coming to a head

In this paper, local government expert Dr. Mike Reid argues for significant policy change that not only reverses the reforms of the past nine years (which reduced local democracy), but improves on the pre-2008 policy settings. He also argues for a cross-party consensus on the basic tenets of the local government system, and then entrenching these to reduce the likelihood of radical local government reform every time central government changes.

The principle of subsidiarity should be understood as a means to strengthen regional and local political power. Tomasz Por?ba discusses the problem of the misinterpretation of this key EU provision. Tomasz Por?

Grand Designs it isn’t, but the singular vision of architect Walter Segal lives on in Lewisham – and the families who built their own homes are inspiring a future generation in search of affordable housing in Britain

By Miloon Kothari. The world is living through an unprecedented housing crisis. Approximately 1.6 billion people are considered to be inadequately housed, while one hundred million are homeless and another sixty million have been displaced from their homes.

Unless something is done about it, the rapid urbanization of the world’s population is nearly certain to exacerbate these figures. This crisis is multi-faceted, including issues ranging from forced evictions to displacement to gentrification; from the mortgage crisis to the austerity-driven decline in public housing to the exponential growth of slums. The worldwide housing crisis is being precipitated by war and destruction; by natural disasters and climate change; by misguided and capital-driven development. But most of all, it is being driven by a neoliberal model that fails treats housing as a commodity instead of as a fundamental right of all humans living on this planet.

The United Nations as well as other international organizations and civil society bodies have in various ways sought to bring attention to this issue and provide tools to assist other organizations, state actors, and non-state movement groups in helping to stem the rising tides of the housing crisis. International organizations are invaluable in establishing normative human rights frameworks and putting pressure on those who are violating people’s housing rights. The question is what exactly they are doing, how they can be most effective, and where they fall short in their fights to halt the housing crisis.

In this study Miloon Kothari, the first appointed United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, reports on the global housing and land crisis and the many human rights violations that it constitutes. He focuses particularly on forced evictions and other forms of displacement caused by war, persecution, and disasters both natural and man-made—for instance those driven by misguided or ill-intentioned development policies.

As UN Special Rapporteur, as well as founder and former director of Habitat International Coalition’s Housing and Land Rights Network, Kothari has played an important role in shaping UN responses in the form of global standards on housing rights, displacement and evictions. In his study he gives insights into the UN approach to the housing and land rights crisis and critically discusses to what extent these standards are currently being implemented on the national and local levels. Kothari concludes with recommendations on how to curb the power of state and corporate actors to expropriate land, and how to better protect people from homelessness, displacement, and other forms of inadequate housing.

Housing justice and urban politics represent a core area of our work at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s New York office. This study is the second in our "City Series” and marks both a continuation and a deepening of our commitment to this urgent political topic. Our first study in the series, "Austerity Urbanism” by Jamie Peck, can be accessed here.

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